|
|
THE DECISION to
invade had apparently been set in stone long before grass-roots opposition
had really gotten rolling. Of course, had the military conflict dragged
on, then street rallies might have mattered. But the word “quagmire” never
did rise to the headlines, and in the end, the peace rallies didn’t stop
the war.
One way of interpreting the
failure of the peace movement to affect U.S. foreign policy is that it
failed strategically. While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned
(and perhaps executed) a 21st-century war plan in Iraq, antiwar protestors
largely relied on 20th-century tactics. Street marches may be the peace
movement’s equivalent of heavy armor and lots of infantry—which has been
supplanted by high-tech weaponry that supposedly requires fewer troops.
Maybe rather than taking to the public square, protestors should have
taken to the new commons: the Internet.
Recent online social movements range from relatively straightforward
petitioning drives (many of which can be found at the clearinghouse
thepetitionsite.com) to the innovative (like voteswap.com, which allowed
people in hotly contested states who wanted to vote for Nader in the 2000
elections but did not want to tip the state into Bush’s column to trade
their vote with Gore supporters in states where the outcome was pretty
much already determined). Straightforward approaches, like e-mail and
Web-based petition drives, generally adapt a classical political strategy
and apply it to the relatively new medium of the Internet. The upside of
the ease by which letters can be e-mailed to senators and petitions can be
drawn up and circulated is also their downside: they get more easily
ignored by public officials who know that e-mail is cheap, so to speak.
Voteswap.com, by contrast, does something through the Internet that would
not have been possible in the early 1990s. Likewise, underdog Democratic
presidential candidate Howard Dean has used the Internet site meetup.com
to organize local volunteer campaign groups. So far, there are 25,000
people who have signed up and about 225 monthly meetings across the
country.
The most interesting uses of Net
technology for political protest are even more innovative and radical than
Voteswap and Meetup. One interesting example is Electronic Disturbance
Theater (EDT): a New York-based group that organizes virtual sit-ins
(www.thing.net/%7Erdom/ecd/ecd.html ). How EDT works is this: they
publicly distribute an applet called FloodNet that, when activated, sends
automatic browser “reload” requests to the targeted Web site every few
seconds. EDT then organizes specific times where certain Web sites will be
hit by thousands of protestors. The hope is to bring down the site. For
example, in 1998, in support of the Zapatista autonomy movement in
Chiapas, Mexico, EDT targeted the servers of the Pentagon and Mexico’s
president Ernesto Zedillo. In January 2002, 160,000 people downloaded
FloodNet from the EDT Web site and deluged the World Economic Forum site;
the server failed after a few hours and stayed down for the rest of the
week. Ricardo Dominguez, EDT’s cofounder, claims that the official goal of
such sit-ins is not necessarily to disable Web servers but merely to
disturb them; in fact, EDT calls the actions “performances.” Of course,
the distinction between disturbing and hacking is a fine line that is
walked with a wink and a nod.
Another fairly
radical group is the Bureau of Inverse Technology (bureauit.org), or BIT.
Like many of these groups, this is an anonymous organization that
straddles the line between activism and art, billing itself as an
“information agency serving the information age.” One of the latest BIT
projects is the antiterror line. This is a phone number—actually two, one
in the United States and one in Britain—to monitor infringements on civil
rights by government authorities in the wake of antiterror legislation.
The principle is simple: you, the user, preprogram the number into your
cell phone and if you are ever confronted by the police, press the number
and the machine at the other end of the line will record the interaction
as evidence. Marchers going off to a protest might gear their phones up;
blacks who are likely to experience racial profiling might also want
one-touch dialing, and of course other populations that are particularly
vulnerable under the USA Patriot Acts and its possible successors—such as
foreigners, particularly those from Islamic countries—might want to be on
the ready. If you are not able to record the actual interaction (after
all, it’s pretty hard to get your cell phone to work if you are being
bludgeoned by a policeman’s billy club), then you can call to report the
event to the phone number after the fact. In this way, the Web server will
build an archive of information about the government that—in its public
accessibility—stands in stark contrast to the way the Feds are
increasingly collecting secreted information about the population.
|
|
|
|
|
 A common thread in the online
activist and arts community is the use of “kits” to enlist other
activists. A kit can be as simple as EDT’s FloodNet program or a
complicated as BIT Radio: instructions on how to build a transmitter to
jam local radio programming, overriding it with an activist message. BIT
did this in New York City during the World Economic Forum, broadcasting
environmental information over National Public Radio’s frequency. The
brevity of the illicit broadcasts prevents the transmitter stations from
being found out. Anyone across the world can theoretically set up a BIT
Radio station if they follow the instructions that are downloadable at the
BIT site.
Another “hactivist” tradition is
that of impersonation. While impersonation for political purposes has a
long tradition—dating at least as far back as 1703, when Daniel Defoe was
arrested for distributing his satire of Anglican Tories, which was taken
to be serious at first—the Net opens up completely new possibilities. For
example, the Yesmen (theyesmen.org ) have pretended to be the World Trade
Organization, by registering the site of the organization that the WTO was
meant to replace (gatt.org). They then issue press releases that fly in
the face of official WTO policy; some unwitting journalists then publish
stories based on them—all the while documenting the reaction. They also
accept speaking invitations on behalf of the WTO through the Web site.
The Yesmen also registered the site
dow-chemical.com. They used this platform to explain why Dow Chemical will
not take responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal, India, chemical disaster nor
offer more than $500 compensation per victim. The response was
overwhelming. However, for added irony, when they registered the site they
chose to list it under “James Parker,” the son of the Dow’s CEO, and used
his real address. When the real Dow found out about what was going on,
they immediately got James Parker to re-register the domain name as his
own, deleting the misinformation. End of story—for now at least. No
worries for the Yesmen—they had already achieved their purpose by getting
plenty of media attention to the issue, which had been long forgotten by
most Americans.
To varying degrees, what
EDT, BIT and the Yesmen share in common is the ability to generate media
attention for their actions and to draw together like-minded individuals
across vast spaces, thereby reducing the need to generate a crowd in any
particular locality. One BIT engineer calls this “scale.” Beside unifying
a geographically diverse protesting community, another benefit of this
kind of networked activism that BIT points to is the fact that—for the
most part—the police cannot shut you down with horses, water hoses, rubber
bullets and mass lock-ups; they can merely reregister your domain name or
take down your server.
Whereas Ricardo
Dominguez claims that street protest is a relic of a bygone era, the
Yesmen and BIT demure. “There is nothing that can replace the generative
power, the connections that are made in face-to-face contact during
protests,” claims a BIT spokesperson. Says, “Andy,” one of the Yesmen, in
an e-mail interview: “It’s clear that traditional forms of protest are
still the most powerful. It’s always hard to measure the effects of such
things, but we know that people taking to the streets helped shut down the
[WTO’s] Seattle Ministerial [meeting], forced [British Prime Minister]
Tony Blair to stop pretending he was representing the majority, etc.—lots
of signs that it works.”
The biggest
payoffs may to be in the linkage of the Net to actual live protest
marches. The peace marches of Feb. 15 represented the largest worldwide
protests ever recorded. As it turns out, they were not completely 20th
century. They had been coordinated by many Net activists, but they still
required people to show up, shout, beat drums, get arrested and so on.
They just happened to not work. But maybe they are just the beginning. If
the Bush administration has more war plans lurking up its sleeve, the
protestors will be ready—on line and off.
Dalton Conley directs the Center for Advanced Social Science Research
at New York University. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economic
Research and the author of “Honky,” a memoir, and “The Pecking Order:
Which Siblings Succeed and Why” (due out in February).
© 2003 Newsweek,
Inc.
|
|
.gif){kind=small}
.gif){kind=spacer}
